The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

This is a very useful little tip from a Redditor: if you are lost somewhere in the menu hell of an automated telephone system a few well dropped profanities will lead to the almost immediate attention of a live human being. True, they may or may not be able to help you but then being able to swear at someone rather than something can still be terribly therapeutic I find.

After exploring every option possible in the machine based list, I eventually got frustrated and used a few choice words that triggered something in the computer I was talking to.

It cut itself off in mid-sentence, apologized, and in about 10 more seconds I was talking to an Apple tech.

I'm not sure this would do much good for me: not owning anything made by Apple I have little reason to call AppleCare. However, it seems that this isn't limited to just this one company:

It turns out that the automated system that Apple uses (but isn’t limited to just this company) is programmed to listen for signs of distress. If that additional menu option is one too many and you unleash a volley of terse language down the phone, it will immediately connect you with a real person.

It's said that there are two routes that a few choice Anglo-Saxonisms can send you down. To someone who can actually do something for you, which is obviously very jolly. Or off to someone whose job is simply to monitor the queues of phone calls. In which case you'll just be switched back into the queue which would be less jolly when all's said and done.

I have to admit though, my nasty little inquisitive mind wants to know quite what words it is that such systems are trained to recognise. "Sounds of distress" might be a euphemism or it might be the true description. In which case a recording of an air raid siren would do it. Or perhaps SOS in Morse code would. But I think that rather unlikely somehow. There is one Redditor who says that any nonsensical world will do: he uses banana.

Or we could even try to experiment our way through what the systems do regard as swearwords. Or sufficient trigger words for example. Possibly even map how they change over languages. Fanny, for example, just means gluteus maximus in American. In English English it's a vulgarism for a much more intimately female part of the anatomy. The F-bomb is known everywhere in the English speaking world (and in much of it that isn't English speaking too) but there are others that are much more ambivalent. I can think of one word which in parts of England means "crotchety person" in an almost approving manner while in other parts of the same country it means a frequently painful and sometimes illegal sexual act.

I also wonder about how it copes with other languages? Would a Russian system miss the standard English words but get the standard Russian phrase which ends in "your mother" (and is often abbreviated to just that alone)? And if this really does work in any language can someone please teach me how to swear in Portuguese? I've still not managed to download my voicemails in a decade of being on Portugal Telecom's system.

Perhaps I should add this experiment to things that are lunatic enough to work as a Kickstarter project. The compiling of a public database of those "sounds of distress" that will jump you through an automated system to a live operative. After all, the information will be useful: and we shouldn't have any problem in recruiting volunteers to work through the richer and riper parts of the dictionaries on the customer care lines of each and every company out there.